7 tips to write a killer blog post every single time

Use these simple (yet effective) tips to write better blog posts that gets more engagement and conversion.

8th Aug 2018

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As if the writing was not difficult in itself, in this age of search engines, you also have to please the Google bots.

To add to it, you need to keep in mind that you’re writing for people.

I know – it seems complicated

And I am not going to lie to you. Writing a blog post that ranks well, gets engagement, and leads to higher conversion can be a daunting task.

While I won’t teach you how to write content, let me give you a few easy to implement tips to make your blog posts geared for more engagement and conversion.

Note that these tips are useful only when you have the starting point sorted – which is to know who you’re writing for and what is the purpose of a blog post.

Write multiple titles and choose the best one

Often, we tend to write a single title and publish the article with it.

Most of the times, the only consideration when writing the title is to make sure that it has the keyword we are trying to rank for in search engines.

While having the keyword in the headline is important, remember that even if you get to the first page of Google, you still need people to click on your article. And this will be determined by how good your title is.

To make sure your titles are catchy and click-worthy, you need to spend more time on it.

If you can’t come up with the perfect title right away, write as many variations as you can. If needed, take a break of a few hours or even a day and get back to it with a fresh mind.

You can use tools such as Portent Title Maker or Co-scheduled Headline Analyzer to do this.

Once you have a few good headlines, pick the one that you think is the best.

If you do this regularly, you’ll notice that just by putting some extra time framing your headline will result in much better headlines (that also get clicked).

PRO TIP: Keep a note of all the good headlines you come across in your day to day work. If possible, have a collection in a Google Doc. If you do this for some time, you’ll have your own awesome collection of headlines that you can use for inspiration.

Write an engaging introduction

Since our attention span is going downhill day-by-day, if you want to capture your readers fancy, you need to have an engaging introduction.

The purpose of the introduction should be to give a sense to the reader of what the article is about and at the same time, keep them intrigued.

One technique that works well is using open loops.

Before I tell you why open loops work so incredibly well, let me first tell you this.

See what I did there. I used an open loop. I told you something, I mentioned it works, but I didn’t tell you what it is, hence the open loop.

Keep the paragraphs short

Also, now that most of the blog posts are consumed using smartphones, if you have big paragraphs, it will fill the entire screen of the phone (which most of the readers find boring).

Try to restrict your paragraphs to two to three lines only.

Also, keep your sentences short. It’s difficult to follow long sentences and if it proves hard to read, you’re going to lose readership.

One way to improve the readability of your content is to use a tool such as Hemingway Editor. It tells you how easy your article is to read. The idea here is to make it so simple that even a sixth grader can read it.

Use sub-headers wisely

No matter how brilliant your blog post is, a lot of your readers are not going to read it completely. Most of the people scan the content and end up reading only the part that intrigues them.

If you have subheadings that are written to grab attention, it can help you increase the on-page dwell time (which is the time that your reader spends on your site).

It also helps your readers as they can scan and quickly go to the specific section they want to read and get value from it.

Break the monotony with multimedia

A lot of text can make your article look dull.

To add some life to it, you can multimedia such as images, infographics, videos, slides etc.

Different people consume content in different ways. Some prefer written content while some prefer videos or audios. Having different types of multimedia content not only makes a boring all text blog post look better, it also helps serve the different types of audience you get.

Make it error free

While you’re not expected to write Shakespearean type English, you do need to make sure that your article is grammatically correct and does not have any misspelled words.

Once you have written a blog post, check it a couple of times. If needed, get someone else to read it for you and ask for feedback (not just about the errors but also the content quality and readability).

You can also take help from tools such as Grammarly that can help you keep your blog posts error free.

Conclude well

Your conclusion should be true to the purpose of your article.

For example, if the purpose of the article is to inform, you can summarize the important points in the article.

If the purpose is to engage, ask your readers to comment or share your post.

If the purpose of the article is to convert, ask your readers to take the appropriate action – be it checking out your product, signing up for your newsletter or booking a consultation.

Often, people directly jump to the conclusion section to get a gist of the article instead of reading the whole article. So, while writing a conclusion, you need to make sure that the conclusion makes sense even when reading in isolation.

These are simple blog writing tips that don’t need any significant incremental effort from your end. However, the impact of these small things could be huge.

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